Homily for Sunday, 15 July 2018

Sunday of the 15th Week in Ordinary Time


Readings of the day: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-10, 11-12, 13-14; Ephesians 1:3-14; Mark 6:7-13

This homily was given at St. Basil's Church, Toronto, ON, Canada. 

Is anybody here a Mark Twain fan? One of my favourite sayings attributed to Mark Twain is a caution against being too wordy: “I didn’t have time to write you a short letter, so I wrote you a long one.” But, in his work, “Refuge of the Derelicts,” in Fables of Man, Mark Twain writes, with special depth if less humour: “There are no accidents. All things have a deep and calculated purpose. Sometimes the methods employed by Providence seem strange and incongruous, but we have only to be patient and wait for the result: Then we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose, and we are rebuked and humbled.”

There are no accidents. Is the same not true of Mark Twain, as for the prophet Amos, as for St. Paul, as for Jesus’ disciples, as for us today? Can we not imagine Amos, in our reading from him today, as puzzled at first by the accusation against him by “Amaziah, priest of Bethel,” of essentially being a career prophet, having chosen purposely to be a thorn in the side of the king and people of Israel? Amos’ answer to Amaziah’s charge of careerism is that he is in fact “no prophet, nor a prophet’s son.” Amos, he says of himself, is a prophet, certainly not because he wanted to be a prophet, but essentially by accident.

And yet there are no accidents. However, there is what we call divine providence. And what is divine providence; God’s providence? Amos speaks of divine providence, not mere accident, when he says to Amaziah, “the Lord took me from following the flock, and the Lord said to me, ‘Go, prophesy to my people Israel.”

It was no accident; I did not want to be a prophet (because who in their right mind would want to be a prophet, especially in Amos’ time?), Amos says, but the LORD made me do it… and I accepted and trusted the LORD’s call to be a prophet. I accepted and trusted that the LORD had and has a plan and a purpose for me; for each and all of us as individuals and as a community of faith, human species, and world, that will be the best for me in the end. I accepted; we accept and trust in divine providence, even if this means sacrificing something good in our lives for a greater, longer-lasting good, and ultimately for our salvation.

Because of this self-sacrificial dimension, divine providence and our trust in it, in God, differs from a kind of self-help, magic, or superstition: “Become rich or healthy immediately by following these ten easy tips. Send this to ten of your friends within 24 hours for good luck; if you do not send this message, you will experience bad luck for seven years.” Although I am being a bit facetious here, divine providence and our trust in God’s plan and purpose have nothing to do with these kinds of self-help, magic, or superstition. As for Amos, St. Paul, for Jesus, and for many of Jesus’ disciples through the ages, trust in divine providence may lead us to sacrifice even our lives for a greater good; the greatest good, eternal life.

Amos was not a career prophet, despite Amaziah’s accusation against him. He discerned a vocation, a calling, to be a prophet, which his own will alone, without the help of God’s grace, would not have accepted. The same was true of St. Paul and of Jesus from the moment he became fully human, one like us in all things but sin. And the same is, has been, and/or will be often true of us.

In the letter to the Ephesians, St. Paul speaks the language not of career but of vocation by God’s providence. St. Paul says that God “chose us in Christ before the foundation of the world to be holy and blameless before him in love.” And then he adds, “In Christ we have also obtained an inheritance, having been destined according to the purpose of him who accomplishes all things according to his counsel and will.”

This language of vocation, of God’s calling; of God’s choice; of plan and purpose; of inheritance is not the same as the language of career. Jesus, like St. Paul after him and Amos before him, staked his life and teaching on his disciples’; on our understanding and practice to some extent of this difference in languages: Career versus vocation by God’s providence; career versus inheritance, plan and purpose of God.

Jesus sends “the twelve” Apostles “out two by two” and asks of them what is impossible without God’s grace: “He ordered them to take nothing for their journey except a staff; no bread, no bag, no money in their belts; but to wear sandals and not to put on two tunics.” In other words, the Apostles were to entrust themselves entirely and self-sacrificially to God’s providence, plan and purpose for their lives, which would ultimately be eternal life.

All this is not to say that, while a vocation is great, a career is necessarily bad. Many or most of us are in or would like to be in stable careers. And yet a vocation, unlike the best careers, does not allow us to retire, let alone early. A vocation holds no promise of a decent salary, pension, or other benefits… So much for workers’ rights the Church asks us to defend, right? A vocation, unlike a career, is something we would not accept on our own without God’s grace. And when we do accept a vocation, a calling by God’s providence and grace, our acceptance of vocation happens “when we recognize that no others would have answered the purpose,” as Mark Twain once said, “and we are rebuked and humbled.”

And yet each of us, at some point, have accepted not a career but a vocation from God: Those of us, for instance, who have been baptized or are preparing or preparing a loved one for baptism; those of us who are married; those of us raising children; those of us who, perhaps very sadly on a personal level, cannot raise children or work through the bureaucracy of the adoption process; those of us who are in religious life or priesthood. “No others” but you or me “would have answered the purpose” to which we are called by God as individuals and as a community of faith.

A vocation is not a career (although they may overlap), and is no accident. A vocation always involves self-sacrifice. I have been and continue to be personally reminded many times of this. A year ago, and again this summer, I visited the parish, St. Kateri in Rochester, just around Lake Ontario from here, where I had served as a deacon and first sixteen months as a priest (I was ordained a priest just over four years ago). In St. Kateri Parish is a young family, good friends of mine, whose first of two children has recovered from four bouts with leukemia in the last seven years and is now eleven years old. A year ago, I had a conversation with the guidance counsellor of the school attached to the parish, St. Kateri School. The guidance counsellor at St. Kateri School is also a personal friend, mother, wife, and cancer survivor. During this conversation, I spoke about how I had become friends with the first family with the daughter who has battled leukemia. After one of this girl’s relapses with cancer, I had anointed her on a Monday and given her first communion in the same hospital bed the following Friday. And I have had other encounters in ministry before and since then with this girl and her family, and we remain close friends. In this conversation, I said at one point to the guidance counsellor that I felt that my journey with this family; my friendship through ministry with them had been somewhat “by accident.”

At this point, my guidance counsellor friend stopped me. She said to me, “There are no accidents. You have become like an uncle to those children and a friend to this family.” Those words, a year and more later, continue to move this itinerant uncle-priest profoundly. I was (ever-so-gently) “rebuked and humbled” by these words of my guidance counsellor friend.

“There are no accidents. All things have a deep and calculated purpose” under God’s sometimes seemingly “strange and incongruous” providence. Perhaps “no others would have answered the call”; would have been in the right place at the right time to minister with and be ministered to by a then-very sick child and her family and friends. But I was there. And I thank God from my depths for this fact; for God’s purposeful providence; for vocation.